Though humanity's musical tastes and preferences have always been unpredictable and surprising (really, people? Milli Vanilli? Michael-F*CKING-BOLTON?!?!) there is one thing you will be able to tell our future robot overlords with absolute certainty: When it comes to music, we LOVES us some child stars (bonus points for including them in a family and/or boy band -- do this and we will literally hand you a large pile of money and our emotional stability, no questions asked).
Now, pop music has seen its fair share of young stars over the years, like Hanson, the Jonas Brothers and the Thing They Call Bieber, but I think it's high time hip-hop get its due.
The last twenty years has produced a laundry list of young rap stars, including notables like Bow Wow, Lil Wayne, Kris Kross, Shyheim, Da Youngstas, and Young Chris, to name a few. Some have capitalized on their young celebrity more successfully than others (Lil Wayne becoming a father at 15, for example), while others remained one-hit-wonders.
Yet, with the September signing of Will Smith's 10-year-old daughter Willow to Jay-Z's Roc Nation and 15-year-old Diggy Simmons landing at Atlantic in March, it has become clear that 2010 is a great time to be young (and rhyming about the injustice of a 9PM bedtime).
This is a recession, after all, and everybody has to pitch in (no matter what age), so here is our list of the 7 best rappers who aren't even old enough to ghost-ride the whip.*
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*Correction: We initially titled this post 'The 7 Best Rappers Under 12,' but soon realized a few of the candidates were slightly older. We added a few more lil' rappers suggested by our readers, and edited the headline to reflect both changes.
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We need a Lil' Eddie Murphy - better yet, Richard Pryor.
I got a joke to tell.
Once there was a lion and a monkey.
The monkey said, "I can make the weather change."
And the lion said,"No, you can't."
So the monkey started climbing up the tree.
And then he started peeing on the lion's head. "Now it's raining!"
Then he started farting. "Now there's thunder!"
Then he started doo-dooing. "Now it's snowing!"
So the lion said, "Oh, yeah? Well, I can make the stars come out."
And then he kicked himin the ding-ding.
The youth needs to be encouraged to try their hand at reading and writing or taking an interesting in math and science, particularly when they're from regions where being a failed rapper is much more respected than being a good student.
yeah, these were great!
showed them doing home work together.
Would you like some tater chips, bubblegum or a freeze cup?" haha
Whether you like it or not, rap is a legitimate art form that has spread across the world in the last thirty years. Just because you folks don't understand it doesn't mean that it isn't an important form of cultural expression.
In my opinion, any form of art that can bring people from every imaginable type of background together is worthy of respect, even if I don't necessarily like it or approve of its content. That's what being a liberal should be about. You folks sound just as bad as the bible-thumpers who complain about "moral decay" because they don't like the fact that people are more accepting of gays than they used to be.
It's almost always the young people who are the vanguards of cultural change, and it's always the older generations who complain about it. The rise of hip-hop is no different than the rise of rock and roll in the fifties and sixties. We already have a president who listens to hip-hop, and he's nearly 50 years old. You folks are just way behind the curve.
You can substitute HipHop for Jazz and go back decades and see people approach it the same way. With Early (and in my opinion, Authentic) Rock and Roll from the early fifties esp that off the pirate radio, people lost their minds. Hiphop doesn't come close to the responses in sheer volume that books,soap box morale speeches, newspaper editorials, Music teacher and critics that wrote and sold books explain why it really wasn't music etc. that rose out of the birth of Rock and Roll. Not to long ago, somebody wrote a letter to newspaper that pinned the decline of civilization to Elvis Presley
As the Funkadelics once stated " America Eats it's Young". The fact is demonizing Youth and how they use their voice is just as American as Apple pie.